This is one of those questions that everyone asks, but everyone has a diferent answer. For my money I like Western Digital. They have always been solid for me, lasting anywhere from 3 to 7 years. And I've never had a problem with noise either. However, I think that since most manufacturers are the same when it comes to making hard drives I'd say the best drive is the best price you can get for the size you want at the time you shop. Using something like
to do that kind of comparison is good. Of course I'm talking about IDE here, because serial ata or scsi are much better drives. If expense is not the problem, go for the scsi controller and go scsi all the way.
In the end whatever you choose make sure you choose the best drive that has the fastest transfer rate, best warranty ( at least 3 years), best rpm, best mean time before failure, and most available space for your money.
All hard drives are relatively quiet, if they are not it usually indicates a problem with the drive itself. Like if its clunking around.
John D. Saucier
jsauce@magicguild.com
Certified Technician
Network Administrator
We get by far the fewest returns with Seagate Barracuda range and they just happen to also be the quietest HDD's as well.
7200.7 range, they also have just introduced a 100gig per platter 7200.7 with very good performance..
Martin
Replying helps further our knowledge, without comment leaves us wondering.
I tend to agree with jsauce, but on the other hand, there has been so many hard drive companies that buy other companies out, I can hardly remember who makes what these days.
As for SCSI, just watch out for heat issues. Especially if you build your own systems. We bought clone towers for servers and spec'd all the parts. We were losing hard drives left and right. When we put a temperature probe on them (HP SCSI drives if I remember right) and they were running way above temp spec.
Turns out the case manufacturer had the fan on the powersupply blowing into the case. They added a cooling fan in the front of the tower below the drive bay. This fan blew out of the case. You would think the combination would give you a good airflow through the case. Actually it did flow over the motherboard nicely, but there was no airflow over the drie bays. Reversing the front fan so that blow fans blew into teh case caused greater airflow over the drive bay and out the intended cooling vents.
(Just an old story from a guy who got his start with the original IBMPC, DOS 2.1, and MFM drives.)
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